Success after FailureHello,My group has chosen “Success after Failure” as the theme of our panel. We will all experience some type of failure in our career but success will only follow if we deal strategically with our failures. Below are two great articles that relate to our panel discussion. The first teaches us about how to bounce back from failure and the second is about how big businesses too can experience failure. Hope you enjoy and learn from them.

I wish you all a big public failure soon
Yasmine Azor

How Failure Breeds Success
By Jena McGregor, with William C. Symonds in Boston, Dean Foust in Atlanta, and Diane Brady and Moira Herbst in New York

Everyone fears failure. But breakthroughs depend on it. The best companies embrace their mistakes and learn from them

Ever heard of Choglit? How about OK Soda or Surge? Long after "New Coke" became nearly synonymous with innovation failure, these products joined Coca-Cola Co.'s (KO ) graveyard of beverage busts.

Choglit, in case you blinked and missed it, was a chocolate-flavored milk drink test-marketed with Nestlé (NSRGY ) in 2002. OK Soda, unveiled in 1994, tried to capture Generation X with edgy marketing. The "OK Manifesto," parts of which were printed on cans in an attempt at hipster irony, asked: "What's the point of OK Soda?" It turned out customers wondered the same thing. And while Surge did well initially, this me-too Mountain Dew later did anything but. Sales began drying up after five years.

Given that history, failure hardly seems like a subject Chairman and CEO E. Neville Isdell would want to trot out in front of investors. But Isdell did just that, deliberately airing the topic at Coke's annual meeting in April. "You will see some failures," he told the crowd. "As we take more risks, this is something we must accept as part of the regeneration process."

Warning Coke investors that the company might experience some flops is a little like warning Atlantans they might experience afternoon thunderstorms in July. But Isdell thinks it's vital. He wants Coke to take bigger risks, and to do that, he knows he needs to convince employees and shareholders that he will tolerate the failures that will inevitably result. That's the only way to change Coke's traditionally risk-averse culture. And given the importance of this goal, there's no podium too big for sending the signal. "Using [the annual meeting] occasion elevates the statement to another order of importance," Isdell said in an interview with BusinessWeek.

CLOSE TO BLASPHEMYWhile few CEOs are as candid about the potential for failure as Isdell, many are wrestling with the same problem, trying to get their organizations to cozy up to the risk-taking that innovation requires. A warning: It's not going to be an easy shift. After years of cost-cutting initiatives and growing job insecurity, most employees don't exactly feel like putting themselves on the line. Add to that the heightened expectations by management on individual performance, and it's easy to see why so many opt to play it safe.

Indeed, for a generation of managers weaned on the rigors of Six Sigma error-elimination programs, embracing failure -- gasp! -- is close to blasphemy. Stefan H. Thomke, a professor at Harvard Business School and author of Experimentation Matters, says that when he talks to business groups, "I try to be provocative and say: 'Failure is not a bad thing.' I always have lots of people staring at me, [thinking] 'Have you lost your mind?' That's O.K. It gets their attention. [Failure] is so important to the experimental process."

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Reaping Success from Failure
Mary Queen R. Bagaoisan
De La Salle University
“Reaping Success from Failure”
Thomas Edison said, “Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up.” Failure is an act of proving unsuccessful, and it is also the nonperformance of something due, required, or expected. (Online Etymology Dictionary., n.d.). Nevertheless an individual can overcome the failures in his life by living the present, by focusing on achieving his goals in life and by not worrying about his problems.
In committing failure, a person forgets what his purpose in life, and that is to live, particularly the present. The big question is, why does everyone fear failure? Is it because of the shame that they have experienced? Or is it because they do not want someone to have an edge over them? If they do not want to experience failing again, they should think about something different that they will do next time. Plan A could have failed, but there are still a lot of possible and infinite ways to do it. Always keep in mind to never give up, just look at Steve Jobs the man who created the MacBook, iPad, iPhone, iTunes store and iPod, he got fired from the company he established, but never lost hope and so, he overcame his problems in order...